It has been a great year for horror. I spoke about it in a review just a few weeks ago after watching Resident Evil.
Then came Other Mommy.
They can’t all be winners.
Other Mommy was a huge disappointment because the initial trailer for this movie was so good. How could a trailer be so intense, creepy and disturbing while the movie it is from is dull, stupid and downright pathetic.
According to IMDB, “Bela, an 8-year-old girl living in a home with marital problems, confronts a sinister entity which comes out of her closet. The presence, whom she calls “Other Mommy,” becomes increasingly threatening to her and her family.”
Jessica Chastain committed to the role, but I was underwhelmed by the performance. It was funny at times, and that is not what the film wanted.
I will say that the young debuting actor Arabella Olivia Clark as Bela did a good job. She handled a lot of the heavy lifting in the story as she had most of the story on her shoulders.
The problem is the story itself was lacking in too many ways. There is no specific plot involved. What is Other Mommy’s motive? Not really sure. There are moments when the tone of the film is all over the place. It felt like they tried to infuse some humor into the story that just never worked and only served to pull me out of the film.
The biggest problem of Other Mommy is that, outside of the great jump scare that they showed in the trailer, this movie was just not scary. It was nowhere near as creepy or intense for almost the entire run time of the film. The trailer made me think this would be a tense and anxious film. Nope. I actually laughed at several of the scenes that were supposed to be scary.
I thought the acting was fine, but there are just too many problems with the film to add to the list of great 2026 horror films.
1.2 stars